Oh my, what a brutal package! And quite a multinational one, too. Featuring USA's Cephalic Carnage, Tasmania's Psycroptic, Canada's Ion Dissonance, Italy's Hour Of Penance and Great Britain's Dyscarnate, the "Initiation of the Misled Tour" - named after Cephalic Carnage's new album "Misled by Certainty" and Psycroptic's new DVD "Initiation" - certainly is the wet dream of many a extreme metal fan. Metal Storm has been there for the very first gig of the tour to inform you if it's really as hot as it promises to be and which bands you should watch out for in particular.

Dyscarnate
I've actually arrived a bit late, ten minutes into Dyscarnate's set, thinking by myself that I could probably skip the openers. Oh, how wrong I was! Upon my arrival I've already been greeted by the owner of the venue with: "Get the hell in there, those guys kick some serious ass!" Making my way to the stage I stumbled upon the organizer of the death metal festival Eisenwahn Open Air, mumbling something like: "Holy shit, these guys are awesome!" And neither of them was exaggerating: Dyscarnate DID kick some serious ass! Massive death metal a la Dying Fetus paired with an awesome job of the sound tech and the crowd got totally blown away! Their no-frills right-in-the-kisser death metal was of such high quality that you would never expect them to have only recently released their debut album. With a set length of thirty minutes they logically played almost the entire "Enduring the Massacre" album save for the first and last song. In hindsight their set should've been ten minutes longer to include those two songs as well. The crowd however didn't demand an encore. After all, if the openers were this mind-blowing already, how awesome would the rest of the night gonna be like?Setlist: Despised And Disgraced, Extinguishing The Face Of Heaven, The Vitruvian Plan, Those Who Trespass Against Us, Yielding The Iron Fist, Judecca

Hour Of Penance
Coming up next were the Italians of Hour Of Penance, who underwent quite an extreme lineup change earlier this year with vocalist Francesco Paoli leaving the band and the band leaving drummer Mauro Mercurio. The remaining two guys made it quite a secret who their replacements are going to be and up to this point, two days after the new members' live premiere, most fans are still left in the dark. And I'm proud to solve this mystery for you: the new members are... *drumroll* Paolo Pieri of Aborym fame and drummer Simone Piras who is also playing in half a dozen other death and black metal bands. Now that we got this settled, let's see how they are live.
Now I can't really compare them to how Hour Of Penance used to be with Paoli and Mercurio on board because this was the first time I've seen them, but if I hadn't known any better I would've thought that they've been performing in this constellation for quite a while already. Their blistering brand of brutal death metal was solid and tight, rhythm machine Simone Piras' delivery was absolutely flawless and Paolo Pieri, who also does the vocals for his solo project Kalki Avatara, performed bloody well, too, so that their baptism of fire can truly be considered as successful. Nonetheless they didn't quite manage to reach the bar which had been raised by their predecessors Dyscarnate. Setlist: Incestuous Dynasty Of Worms, Paradogma, Liturgy Of Deceivers, The Woeful Eucharisty, Drowned In The Abyss Of Ignorance, Absence Of Truth, Incontrovertible Doctrines, Adversary Of Bigotry, Misconception

Ion Dissonance
Somehow the Canadian mathcore mammoths of Ion Dissonance even make The Dillinger Escape Plan look like a basket full of puppies yelping in 4/4. Which sucks if you actually like puppies as much as I do, so that I just can't listen to Ion Dissonance at home due to the irritatingly immense amount of breakdowns. Interestingly they weren't all that hard to digest in a live environment. True, they were still all over the place, but even as a breakdown allergic you could listen to them without going all lunatic yourself and even appreciate some moments. The fans of the band however were bound to be pleased: after having to wait three years for Ion Dissonance to return to Europe, they still got a set containing at least one song from each of their albums. And if one fan followed the band's request and hooked them up with something to smoke, I'm sure ID must have been pleased as well.
Interesting piece of trivia: when asking drummer JF for the setlist he wrote it down from the top of his head, but couldn't remember the name of the opener as the band itself doesn't call the song by its actual name. Interestingly he didn't remember the band-internal name of the song either. Probably someone has indeed followed the band's request by the time I've talked with him...Setlist: After Everything That's Happened What Did You Expect, The Surge, The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same, The Girl Next Door Is Always Screaming, We Like To Call This One Fuck Off, You People Are Messed Up, She's Strychnine

Cephalic Carnage
It was quite a surprise for most people when Cephalic Carnage took the stage as everyone was expecting them - standing on the top of the posters - to play as last band of the night. Apparently they and Psycroptic switch positions each night though, which makes sense actually, seeing as the tour has been named after both these bands' newest outputs.
So now it was Cephalic Carnage's turn to suck us into their maelstrom of chaos. While Ion Dissonance live were easier to digest than on their studio works, it was the other way round for the Ceph. Their genre-bending groovy tech death metal/grindcore/jazz mix made it difficult for the mind to actually follow the music - unless you were stoned out of your mind as much as Cephalic Carnage had been. Totally going apeshit on stage, bumping into each other all the time and announcing the same song twice in a row, they elegantly displayed that sane people just couldn't come up with this kind of music. Unfortunately I couldn't get hold of the setlist, but "Warbots A.M.", "Abraxas of Filth", "Endless Cycle of Violence" and "Lucid Interval" were definitely part of the set, a set which left me puzzled whether I was supposed to enjoy it. True, the musical part was well-executed and all, but I just couldn't get rid of the feeling that I was a few beers behind to be able to fully comprehend what was going on on stage.

Psycroptic
Fortunately - for me at least - Psycroptic were a lot less chaotic and stuck to the main ingredients of well made modern death metal: fast, brutal and semi-technical without drifting into guitar wankery these Tasmanian devils probably represented the least common denominator of all bands playing tonight. Their set was absolutely relentless from start to finish, filled to the brim with energy and pushed all those over the edge who hadn't gotten their brains turned to mush by the previous four bands yet. Setlist: Horde In Devolution, Lacertine Forest, (untitled new track), A Calculated Effort, Ob(Servant), The Isle Of Disenchantment, Initiate, The Colour Of Sleep

However Psycroptic suffered from the same problem as the previous three bands: they all got to play after Dyscarnate who had raised the bar so high that no other band managed to surpass them. Maybe their overflowing enthusiasm might have been responsible for this impressive feat and the other bands will catch up after a few gigs when their experience finally kicks in. Nevertheless Dyscarnate were the definite winners of the night and I can only conjure all of you: if you plan to attend this tour - which I can only recommend -, be there on time. Or live with the guilt of having missed the probably best band of the night.

Photos by Daniel "Promonex" Pereira of Metal Storm.
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